Nefer Hieratic

This design position paper presents Nefer Hieratic, a contemporary typographic system that reinterprets Egyptian hieroglyphs through a practice-based, gestural, and systemic approach. Rather than treating hieroglyphs as pictorial artifacts or static archaeological forms, the project understands them as written signs shaped by gesture, material constraints, and internal structural logic. In contrast to existing digital hieroglyphic fonts—largely driven by epigraphic standardization and characterized by neutral, monolinear forms—this research proposes a typographic reading rooted in the historical transition from monumental hieroglyphs to hieratic writing. Through iterative sketching, abstraction, and the definition of reusable graphic radicals, Nefer Hieratic constructs a coherent and reproducible system suitable for contemporary digital contexts. The paper positions typography as a cultural act rather than a neutral tool, and situates this project within a broader line of research on non-alphabetic writing systems, visual sovereignty, and authorial type design.